5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

In the contemporary world, experiencing extreme events have become part and parcel of many individuals and communities’ everyday realities. From genocide and war, state violence, economic crashes, to pandemics and severe climate change, extreme conditions and events have been made commonplace. These circumstances have led to severe collective and intergenerational suffering, displacement, and created material vulnerabilities.

Within these radical times, humanitarian and medical interventions, and their discourses of recovery and social justice, often seem lacking conceptual structure, are inappropriate in scale, and many times unfitting or insensitive to cultural difference.

This panel is focused on interdisciplinary inquiries into experiential knowledge of distress and recovery during and after extreme events. We look at how individuals and communities live, survive and manage their lives in extreme times, mapping innovative ways of healing, recovery and rebuilding.

We also examine the various support mechanisms, professional interventions, and policies of care around extreme events, assessing their efficiency and theoretical assumptions. In this panel, we draw on ethnographic, sociological and clinical approaches from various regions like Central America, East Asia, the Middle East, and South-East Europe, to ask the following questions:

• What are the ethical, methodological, and epistemological challenges of researching distress caused by extreme events?
• What are the commonalities and differences between distress caused by different extreme events?
• What are the key gaps in knowledge and support for distress caused by extreme events

Note: The proposed panel has the 4th organiser, Felipe Szabzon from the University of Copenhagen